In today's networking environment, network users, including mega data centers, enterprises, and telecommunication companies, require the traffic data from a networking device in order to optimize their applications. The network data in which the network users are interested includes port status, traffic volume, error rate, and queue depth, as well as other data statistics.
The traffic data is collected and stored in network devices, such as network ASICs. When network users need the data, they issue commands through one or more SNMP, CLI, or Web interfaces to retrieve the data from ASIC, one data element at a time. This used to be acceptable, but it cannot scale with the amount of data that generated from the devices today.